Our commitment to making sure nobody gets left behind
Our team recently received training in unintentional discrimination from EqualiTeach. We’re taking the learning to ensure we are creating equality for everyone we work with.
We’ve talked before about some of the positive steps we’ve taken to increase and enhance the support Firstport provides to diverse social entrepreneurs. In the last year, many of these efforts have reflected the recommendations made in the The Access Report, which we worked on with Dechomai and Social Investment Scotland, and which explored some of the barriers faced by global majority social entrepreneurs in Scotland when trying to access investment.
For example, last year we partnered with Dechomai to co-design the Autumn 2024 LaunchMe investment readiness programme, tailoring it to reach communities which might not otherwise have engaged with us, and to bring in facilitators from those communities.
We’ve renewed our approach to the Catalyst Fund (our revenue-based repayable loan product). One of the strands of this renewed approach is Access Catalyst, which we’re working on in partnership with Dechomai and Syncplex Lab. Access Catalyst aims to open doors to Catalyst loan funding to global majority social entrepreneurs and will embed participatory decision-making into the process.
We’re also delighted to have signed up to the Pathways Pledge, which is an initiative that aims to support women and underrepresented founders in Scotland. As part of our involvement, we have committed to looking at our grants and investment data with a gender lens, and to evaluate the Ready to Rise programme, which supports women returners to set up social enterprises.
Making change from within
We’ve been working hard to make change internally too. Some of the steps we’ve taken include launching our refreshed Diversity & Inclusion framework and more recently, we’ve sought to ensure that appointments to our board reflect the diverse individuals and communities we support. To find out more about our efforts here, read our blog.
Another step we’ve taken – as part of our organisational commitment to ‘leaving no one behind’ – has been to procure training in unintentional discrimination (also known as unconscious bias training).
We were therefore delighted to welcome the hugely experienced Sarah Soyei of EqualiTeach along to our recent in-person staff get-together, where Sarah skillfully and energetically guided us through the different, subtle forms of unintentional discrimination and micro-aggressions. She also gave us a host of useful tools to recognise, counteract, and challenge them in our day-to-day work.
Sarah explained that biases such as confirmation bias and affinity bias can creep into everyone’s decision-making all the time, and that this isn’t something which we should shy away from acknowledging. What’s important is how we act on those biases.
As a funder, this is important to Firstport because we want to ensure that the decisions we make are fair and equitable. One of Sarah’s top tips is to ‘slow down’ (which is not always that easy!). Another is to always ask ourselves: ‘What sources have I used to inform my opinion?’, and to actively seek out different people’s opinions and ideas, to challenge our own, and to see things through a different lens.
It doesn’t just stop at providing training for our staff. We’ve also rolled out this training to our board members and external investment committee members. It is our duty and responsibility to ensure that we provide these tools to everyone within Firstport who is involved in funding and investment decision-making.
Putting learning into practice
The feedback from this training has been hugely positive (though perhaps not from Skye, our colleague’s long-haired Dachshund, who was also in attendance!). Team members said that the training made them think deeply about their own decision-making and how unintentional discrimination can creep in. What’s more, they’re committed to putting the suggested tools into practice.
Our work in this area continues, and we’re looking forward to our next in-person get-together, where we’ll be reflecting on this training, how it’s impacted our work and the decisions we make, and we’ll look at the next steps in our journey to make sure no one is indeed left behind.